Scholars Look To Literature To Find The Meaning Of Life

August 8, 2011

Plato and Aristotle in Raffaello Sanzio's "The School of Athens" (Creative Commons)

What is the meaning of life? How do you know?

Sure, they might be cliched questions. But really, is there one person out there who has never wondered about the meaning of life? And the thing is, we’re living in an age where for a lot of people, those questions are harder to answer than ever.

That’s why Harvard philosophy professor Sean Dorrance Kelly and his colleague Hubert Dreyfus put their heads together to offer us a new framework — one that’s based in the lessons of literature — to make sense of how we engage with what is sacred. That is, if anything is sacred any more.